Education

Despite the huge fluctuations in Bitcoin with the price of each Bitcoin skyrocketing and crashing invariably, it looks like the demand for one has still been unprecedented. While the craze for bitcoin has been shifting to continents to countries to cities around the globe, business schools are no exception to it. The obesssion for the digital currency has gripped the business schools as well receiving much demand from the students and executives wanting an education in bitcoin and others. The emerging cryptocurrency market has now acquired a strong foothold in the MBA curriculum with Blockchain and others being incorporated into the syllabi.

Invented by a pseudonymous software developer going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2009, Bitcoin is the first and most famous digital cryptocurrency in the world. It is a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending and is completely decentralized with no server or central authority. Cryptocurrency course has entered the campus in 2014, with NYU Stern School of Business, becoming the first major university to launch a course in the field of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It was later followed by few other top US business schools joining the race to incorporate blockchain education.

Below are the top Universities offering Blockchain courses:

1) NYU Stern School of Business

The Stern School of Business at NYU is the first major US academic institution to offer a course in cryptocurrencies to its graduate students in 2014. David L. Yermack, the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation at New York University Stern School of Business, was the professor who taught this course. David Yermack became a man of great demand ever since he started teaching at the University and the course has taken well across New York. He has been traveling to countries as a guest professor delivering guest lectures in Universities. The NYU Stern cryptocurrencies course which had a few dozen students when it started out has now grown to have more than 100 students and is expecting many.
With the increasing demand for the course, the University now plans to offer a new option for undergraduates as well to learn about the field.

2) Duke University – USA

Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, offers the course “Innovation and Cryptoventures" focused on blockchain technology. The course is taught by Campbell R. Harvey, Professor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. The school does not simply offer a course exploring transactions in bitcoin, but the idea of the course is to understand a disruptive technology and to assess its implications on how business is conducted in the future.

3) Princeton University – USA

New Jersey-based Princeton University offers a blockchain related course called “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies.” This is an online course offered via Coursera and addresses important questions about Bitcoin. The course covers the most prominent and recommended questions like: How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold?

4) Stanford University – USA

California-based Stanford University offers a blockchain related course called “Bitcoin Engineering" and teaches its participants how to make Bitcoin-enabled applications. The course covers all aspects of cryptocurrencies, including distributed consensus, Blockchains, smart contracts, and applications.

5) University of California – Berkeley – USA

The University of California offers an open-source undergraduate cryptocurrency course for their students. There is a student-run organization at UC Berkeley which organizes the largest crypto meetup in the East Bay and hosts tech talks, developer tutorials, workshops and more. It also builds side projects and does research with cutting-edge blockchain and crypto technologies.

6) Cyprus’ University of Nicosia – Cyprus

The University of Nicosia is the leading university in Cyprus and one of the largest English language universities in the Mediterranean region. The University offers the first Master of Science degree in Digital Currency, available worldwide through an online format. The first course in the degree, “Introduction to Digital Currencies", is offered for free as an open enrollment MOOC course to anyone interested in learning about the fundamental principles of Digital Currency. The University of Nicosia is also the first accredited university in the world to accept Bitcoin payments.

7) University of Cumbria – UK

The University of Cumbria launched a free online Master-level course that focuses on the future of money. Among other things, the course will seek to address the dangerous assumption prevalent in the bitcoin community, that money is best understood as an asset with value in itself. UK’s University of Cumbria was the first educational institution to receive a tuition payment in Bitcoin and it accepts only bitcoin for two specific courses.

8) IT University of Copenhagen – Denmark

The IT University of Copenhagen organizes Blockchain Summer School that focuses on educating students in the blockchain technology to be able to develop solutions within three focal industries. The participants will learn how blockchain technology is disrupting existing business models and will gain insights into paradigmatic changes occurring from economic, organizational and computer science viewpoints. Within the summer school this year, participants will learn how to set up a development environment and how to work with the emergent crowd-funded decentralized blockchain application platform of Ethereum.

9) Blockchain University – USA

Blockchain University offers a unique platform for education, talent development, and ideation for the global blockchain ecosystem. Through public & private training programs, hackathons & demo events, the university enables startups and corporations to initiate powerful blockchain innovations across industry sectors.

10) B9 Lab Academy – UK

B9 Lab Academy offers world-class online training in blockchain and decentralized applications for developers, technical experts, and analysts. The course is aimed at experienced technical stakeholders, introducing everything needed to understand the technology, smart contracts and both technical and social frameworks relating to the technology. The course goes into the underlying theory of blockchain, covers Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger in depth and provides an overview of many other protocols both in public and managed networks.